Morgen's+Reflective+Porfolio

=Morgen's Reflective Portfolio=


 * ==Table of Contents==

Letter of introduction

"How does students’ language development affect their learning?"

"How can we bridge the gap between home and school literacies?"

"How are social identity, power, and academic literacy related?" ||

Letter of Introduction
Dear Reader,

As I began this course, I was undeniably excited about its focus. I love language and linguistics, have long seen the connection between education and opportunity/ literacy and power, and was thankful for an opportunity to explore these topics as they pertained to our students. Over the semester, these topics were approached from a variety of angles, deepening my knowledge, my commitment to my work with students, and even my own litercy.

The questions that guided our work during this course do not have a simple or correct answer, and can only really be worked out through practice. I was happy to assimilate a lot of what I already knew about my students and the nature of language directly into practice. I learned a lot more about my students, though, as I worked out the question of their academic success specifically through the lens of their experience and identity as language users, and specifically as I completed the first two phases of the community description.

This course taught me a lot about how to instruct students in the use of Standard language without sending negative messages about their identities and primary discourses. I learned about how to teach code switching in the classroom, as well as the importance of this strategy for teaching Standard English in a non-traditional way (although it’s always good to make new traditions), and in general about different ways of making the curriculum accessible to students with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. I’m also happy to say that, through my work for this course, I feel like I have become much more digitally literate, and will look to incorporate more opportunities for assessment using more digital (and thus, more appealing) mediums.

Moving forward, I hope that our guiding questions continue to be worked out through my practice as an educator. I feel theoretically confident about my knowledge of the topics that we have covered, but I know that I could do an even more rigorous job attending to my students’ linguistic backgrounds and needs as I teach them. In this way, I am excited to begin working on redesigning my curriculum so that these needs are consistently addressed, and so that explicit discussions about language, literacy, Standard English and code switching can occur early on, and inform the way that my students frame their work in an English classroom. I also hope to learn more about teaching grammar in context, begin doing this consistently in practice, and continue my endless hunt for sentence gems.

Cheers!

Morgen